1945 has a strong claim to be the most important year in history. In the history books, it feels like a year when everything happened all at once.
1945 began with the liberation of Auschwitz and the revelation of unimaginable horrors. It was the year of the race to Berlin between armies from both the west and the east – culminating in the suicide of Adolf Hitler, with news of the execution of Mussolini outside Rome too. Cue joyous celebrations of Victory Day – in Europe, at least – though without yet knowing if the war in the Pacific would last months or years. Yet 1945 would also become the year of the atom bomb, dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki – foreshadowing Cold War decades lived in fear of nuclear Armageddon. And it was the year of Potsdam and Yalta, when the maps of continents were redrawn, and the promise of freedom deferred for four decades for half of Europe. 1945 was the year of the British election landslide which gave Churchill his marching orders, inviting a Labour government to make a better job of winning the peace than last time. It was the year the Nuremberg trials began. A form of victor’s justice, perhaps, but conveying a belief in justice and international order, marked too by the founding of the United Nations before Christmas.
To be marking the 80th anniversary of VE Day this week conveys why 1945 feels distant to most of us today. When the war was won, 95% of us were yet to be born. Most of those who are alive today and were born before VE Day were still under five when the war ended. So most of us inherited the stories of 1945 through school textbooks and television documentaries. Yet this week of commemoration has reminded us – perhaps for the last time with major ceremonies – that the events that most of us know from grainy black and white photographs or newsreel footage are still living memories for a dwindling few.
Yet 1945 still matters, because just about every one of us who has since lived in our country, our continent or indeed the world has been shaped by what happened that year.
Try to identify the most important year in a thousand years of history in England, or across the British Isles, and the Second World War years have an unimpeachable claim, simply because the stakes were so high. However important previous events were, like the break with Rome in 1534 or the Union of 1707, their meaning would have been obliterated had totalitarianism triumphed in the 1940s. The big later turning points – Thatcherism in 1979, making a political choice for Europe in 1972 and 1975 – are important in our times, but clearly not on the same scale at all, nor would they have been possible in the dystopian parallel universe where the war was lost.
Choosing between the war years, the year that might claim to outrank 1945 could be its close cousin of 1940. That was the year when the existential threat was greatest – indeed on three distinct occasions. There was the miraculous evacuation at Dunkirk. The War Cabinet meeting of May 8, 1940 is a somewhat neglected great turning point, where Winston Churchill needed Clement Attlee and his Labour colleague to outvote – by just three to two – the preference of the old appeasement duo of Neville Chamberlain or Lord Halifax, who wanted to open talks about what Hitler’s terms for peace might be. Then, of course, the Battle of Britain. 1941 – as America joined the war – and 1944, with the D-Day landings on the beaches, were the years that the tide of the war turned, making 1945 the year of growing confidence in victory. VE Day itself did not come as a surprise, in the way that the armistice had in 1918.
May 8, 1945 was a day of relief, joy and hope – though it could have been a difficult time to be hopeful. There was the destruction and devastation of war. Intense fighting was still ongoing in the east, which many thought might last a few years, rather than a few months. There was debt, austerity and the retention of rationing for most of the next decade. There was mass displacement, too: 1945 was a year when more people were on the move, globally, than in any year before or since. Yet the response was not to declare the situation unmanageable, but to respond to the horrors of the Holocaust with new global systems to protect refugees.
Some wonder if the meaning of 1945 will fade in an increasingly diverse Britain. But if we know our history, we can understand why that ought not to be the case. The armies that fought and won both world wars look more like the Britain of 2025 in their ethnic and faith mix than the Britain of 1945 or 1918. That important truth was rarely reflected in the war films of the 1950s and 1960s. But it has increasingly emerged, and is increasingly understood, in this century. We all need to know that story, of how wartime service shapes the post-Windrush era, to join the dots of how our past, present and future are linked.
So 1945 came to matter not only because the war was won, but because of the choices made at home and abroad after it ended. 1945 was the hinge year for the twentieth century. The second half of the century was much more a period of peace, prosperity and democracy across the West than ever before. That meaning of 1945 may be easier to grasp in 2025 – a year in which the volatility of global politics and trade has been intense. Donald Trump has, in just 100 days, abandoned most of the central premises of the global multilateral system shaped after 1945 through the US commitment to Nato and cooperation with Europe.
So the VE Day anniversary should be a chance to celebrate as well as commemorate. May 8, 1945 was among the most hopeful days in our history – because it was a day when people looked forward, as well as back. There was a determination to now win the peace, not just the war. Every one of us has reasons to be grateful for the choices made then. Maintaining what we inherited from the spirit of 1945 will depend on the choices that we, our leaders and our societies make next.
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